Over three quarters (79 percent) of major tech purchases include a non-technical buyer with “significant” influence over the final decision. This puts additional pressure on sales and marketing organizations to speak the business language of their prospects and customers, not just demonstrate technical expertise. Doing so requires the support of primary-sourced sales intelligence like Emissary.
A strong vertical marketing strategy can help reach these cross-functional buyers, drive inbound leads, and help solution providers differentiate themselves in crowded markets — but only if you avoid these common mistakes.
Pitfall #1: Falling in love with huge markets
The first step in vertical marketing is selecting target industries. The key is to get granular in your analysis.
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Explore Vertical Insights within Emissary Knowledge to uncover technology-related business issues, buying processes, and decision-makers. Unlike generic industry profiles, these sales intelligence insights are collected directly from industry executives offering a deeper, tech sales perspective.
Large industries have massive potential due to sheer size — but they’re hard to personalize for. Instead, look for:
- Verticals and sectors that are narrow enough that the group members see themselves as peers, role models, or competitors.
- Segments that use similar jargon. Do the accounts in your chosen vertical use the same shorthand and terminology?
- Groups of accounts experiencing the same market conditions (regulations, consumer behaviors, and economic factors) in the same way.
E.g., instead of focusing on “Financial Services,” you may be better off investing in Commercial Insurance or Payments. Instead of “Retail,” you may get more leverage out of Home Goods, Clothing, or Pharmacies.
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Conduct custom research with the Emissary advisor network to gauge industry propensity to buy your specific solution types, identify buyer personas, and test out potential value propositions.
Pitfall #2: Sticking with status quo personas
Another danger zone is stale persona profiles. Start with your core profiles and ensure that they’re complete with needs, common pain points, job tasks, behavioral patterns, and KPIs – as well as anything other relevant psychographic or demographic information, which the right sales intelligence tools can help you identify.
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Interview Emissary advisors, executive-level tech buyers to fuel persona research with firsthand “voice of buyer” insights.
Now, consider what derivations, and additions, you’ll need to engage your target industries. It’s tempting to focus on core IT roles such as Director of Infrastructure or Cloud. They may be the closest to your solutions and use cases. But as you take a vertical approach, you’ll need profiles for business leaders too.
Example business personas with significant tech budgets :
- Retail: Customer experience executives in retail may own budgets focused on digital fulfillment which ultimately impact core infrastructure.
- Life Sciences: Product and research leaders may manage the largest technology budgets as they build new products and outfit research facilities.
- Professional Services: Commercial (sales/marketing) executives invest for market growth including both internal capabilities and billable client projects.
- CPG: Purchasing and supply chain executives will fund data solutions to balance the liabilities of amassing inventory with the risk of shortages.
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Explore the Buyer Insights within Emissary Knowledge to identify key buying titles for specific industries, their business issues, and performance metrics.
Pitfall #3: Sounding like an outsider
With a grip on industries and buyer personas, it’s time to start a conversation with them in language that resonates. This is particularly challenging in the tech world because you already communicate so much technical information to the market. Layering in vertical context can result in unintelligible messaging – especially if it exposes a lack of expertise. To keep from sounding like an outsider, conduct extensive “listening” research using sales intelligence tools that use primary-sourced insights and go beyond publicly scraped data:
- Subject matter experts (SMEs). Leverage external expertise to clue you into hot topics in the industry, connections to your value proposition and placement options (I.e., Where are industry conversations happening?)
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Interview Emissary advisors to shape and refine content for industry audiences. Mine their expertise to focus on relevant business issues, catch language disconnects, and provide quotes for credibility.
- Events and networks. Attend trade shows and note common themes, business issues, and jargon. Join social media groups and discussion threads to uncover tone and topics that encourage engagement.
- In-house data. See if there are common customer complaints, or requests, from accounts in the target verticals. Are there themes among your highly satisfied customers? Capture them in new case studies.
At best, outsider messaging is ineffective. At worst, it can make you look out of touch and alienate your target.
Pitfall #4: Stopping at content
Vertical content often begins as “skins” for existing assets. E.g., substituting page headers and images on the website. The next step is to build new assets, fully focused on target industries.
While content is a great place to start, the most effective strategies extend across all marketing initiatives:
- ABM. Build a one-to-many ABM campaign aimed at a vertical including customized emails, paid ads, direct mail, landing pages, and more.
- Events. Add vertical conference sponsorships to your calendar and create your own events. Utilize vertical SMEs as panel guests to draw prospects and bring instant credibility.
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Utilize Emissary advisors as speakers and panel participants to bring an industry perspective to both internal and client-facing events.
- Outbound. Equip your outbound team with vertical lists, email copy, and collateral to integrate inbound and outbound activity.
Pitfall #5: Vertical marketing without vertical selling.
While improved over time, sales and marketing misalignment persists in the form of disconnected account lists, perceptions on content, and lead definitions. Successful marketers reduce the sales gap by working from a shared set of vertical insights:
- Sales operations (aka Revenue Operations or RevOps) is always on the lookout for insights. Vertical insights help commercial operations teams analyze markets, assign territories, and define channel strategies.
- Sales enablement (aka Revenue Enablement) can incorporate insights into vertical training, onboarding, sales kick offs, and other development activities.
💡 EMISSARY TIP: Use Emissary advisors to role play as customers during vertical training simulations.
- Sales teams can mine vertical insights to build prospecting emails, sales decks, and account plans.
Use inside insights to amp up your vertical marketing with better sales intelligence tools
Vertical approaches offer significant impact given the increasing need for business-level marketing and selling in the tech space. But these strategies require more research, context, and subject-matter expertise than any other element of your marketing strategy. As a result, many marketers shy away due to a lack of time. Or, they settle for swapping out images on a web page.
By using primary-sourced sales intelligence, you can streamline your research and get vertical campaigns into the market more quickly while making better decisions about industry selection, content creation, and execution.
Leverage Emissary’s Primary Sales Intelligence
Emissary revolutionizes the sales process by equipping teams holistically with comprehensive primary-sourced sales intelligence, helping you distinguish yourself from the competition and leverage unique insights to win the sale. Talk to our team today to explore how our tools can help.
1 Emissary Buyer Snapshot: How Tech Execs Buy Enterprise Software. n-673.
